Open Cultural Studies 2018; 2: 374–382 Research Article Anthony Dwayne Boynton, II* August Wilson, Afrofuturism, & Gem of the Ocean https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2018-0034 Received February 18, 2018; accepted September 26, 2018 Abstract: August Wilson's Century Cycle is as much a theatrical experiment of black cultural history and sociology as it is one of storytelling. Though often considered a realist playwright, Wilson walks beyond the realist landscape into speculative and imagined ones in Gem of the Ocean. His investment in cultural critique and history enhances the possibility of an enriching analysis of his work as speculative fiction. This research project locates the ties between Wilson’s affinity with history and the creation of a dystopian Pittsburgh in the play. In Wilson’s work, set in 1904, the antebellum past is so close to the post-Emancipation present, temporally and socio-politically, that there is almost no difference at all. The flattening of time Wilson insinuates through the milieu, a capitalist-police state, is articulated through characters’ relationship with it. Wilson is welcomed in conclusion into black speculative traditions of re-imagining time and using cultural histories to critique cultural realities. Keywords: August Wilson, Afrofuturism, black speculative fiction, history, black theatre Introduction August Wilson’s Century Cycle is as much a theatrical experiment of black cultural history and sociology as it is one of storytelling. Wilson’s work often assumes a realist milieu; Fences, readily comes to mind in this respect. We have to question how this reduces, or at least limits, how we interact with his plays. To be sure, the playwright is able to walk beyond the realist landscape into speculative and imagined ones. What happens when we interrogate how assumptions of Wilson’s work inhibit our reading and scholastic interpretations of Wilson’s plays? The primary mission of the playwright’s decalogue is to dramatise black American experiences in Jim Crow and with systematic oppression across the 20th century. Isn’t he able to articulate such outside the realm of realism? This present study examines August Wilson as a black speculative fiction writer. Wilson’s investment in history does not reduce the chance of this at all; in fact, it enhances the possibility of an enriching analysis of his work as speculative fiction. To illustrate my point, I delineate how history and the black speculative imagination are intertwined, and especially history with the writing of dystopian fiction. This research explores Gem of the Ocean (2003) as a dystopian play set in a capitalist-police state. I will analyse the setting of the play and its relationship with Eli, Citizen, Caesar, and Solly, who are all products of the dystopian Pittsburgh (and America) they live in. Though the playwright is often branded as a realist playwright, inserting him into a black speculative tradition and reading his work as such strengthens the playwright’s intentions of cultural criticism. *Corresponding author: Anthony Dwayne Boynton, II, University of Kansas, Department of English, Lawrence, KS 66044, United States, E-mail: [email protected] Open Access. © 2018 Anthony Dwayne Boynton, II, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Com- mons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License. August Wilson, Afrofuturism, & Gem of the Ocean 375 History and the (Black) Speculative Mode August Wilson’s “The Ground on Which I Stand” (1996) articulates not only the playwright’s artistic philosophy but also his thoughts on the need for inclusion and the autonomy of black voices and artists in theatre. Black creatives tell a (hi)story that, in his view, white directors and writers would only mute. Wilson states: So much of what makes this country rich in art and all manners of spiritual life is the contributions that we as African Americans have made. We cannot allow others to have authority over our cultural and spiritual products. We reject, without reservation, any attempts by anyone to rewrite our history so to deny us the rewards of our spiritual labors, and to become the cultural custodians of our art, our literature and our lives. To give expression to the spirit that has been shaped and fashioned by our history is of necessity to give voice and vent to the history itself. (497) Wilson names black folk as not merely participants but producers of American culture and demands that those cultural products be owned, cultivated, and told by black folk. Black folks’ lived experiences informs the art they create; Wilson’s call-to-arms implores black artists to “embrace the political dictates of our history.” Certainly, Wilson’s Decalogue is not negligent of history or politics; his work is bound to history, a word that appears in his essay 28 times. Moreover, it was the playwright’s desire to perform cultural criticism. His intentions do not displace him from a tradition of black speculative fiction. The impulse to use the speculative imagination to question one’s experiences with systems of power is at the heart of the black speculative mode and Afrofuturism. At the turn of the new millennia, Walter Mosley wrote the essay “Black to the Future,” a plea for more black voices in science fiction and fantasy. His fascination with science fiction, he says, lies in the fact that whatever he conceives can be written and made possible. This is the nature of the genre, “Science fiction and its relatives (fantasy, horror, speculative fiction, etc.) have been a main artery for recasting our imagination” (405, my emphasis). That is, science fiction can be the lifeblood of black creative energy and imagination. Mosley argues that this is the reason why black people are attracted to science fiction and fantasy. Recasting black folk back into histories and narratives from which they’ve been erased repurposes the genre, “Black people have been cut off from their African ancestry by the scythe of slavery and from an American heritage by being excluded from history. For us, science fiction offers an alternative where that which deviates from the norm is the norm” (405). Speculative fiction allows black people to be reimagined into existence and reunite with ancestral pasts. Afrofuturism addresses and heals fractures caused by traumas of domination and oppression. Mark Dery, a white cultural critic who coined the term in 1993, says Afrofuturism can be thought of as “African- American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future” (736). The critic’s iteration rests in how black expression can be used along with conventions of science fiction and future world-building. Dery’s concern with the making of the future may be the impetus to the inquiry, he posits, “Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?” (736). Like Mosley, Dery is mindful of the possible effects trans-generational trauma from slavery. However, there are reductive implications to his questioning. Dery’s concern with the possible damage traumatic history can cause to a community’s capacity to build futures is negligent of how black expressive arts have always used the past to be thoughtful about the present and future. In Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction, André Carrington argues that Dery’s early iteration of Afrofuturist thought pigeonholes African American expressive culture to the past “as a casualty of racial oppression” (23). Dery's question implies that trauma stifles one’s ability to create new iterations of the future. Carrington offers a critique to this, saying Dery “invokes the discursive eradication of the African American past as a potential obstacle to the emergence of Afrofuturism” (23). The contention with Dery’s inchoate position roots Afrofuturism in a white futurist tradition, one where writers “hoped to literally destroy all vestiges of their classical civilization to extend the purported virtues of the industrial age into all areas of knowledge” (23). These futurists, coming from a European tradition, considered the time to be totally linear whereas diasporic worldviews consider the time to be cyclic and 376 A.D. Boynton, II connected. The black speculative mode blurs the rigid conditions of Western iterations of time1 and space— Afrofuturist praxis reiterates the past to (re)imagine new futures. Afrofuturist ideology has the capacity to add to, revise, and rethink history. Ytasha Womack’s foundational work Afrofuturism: the World of Black Sci-fi and Fantasy Culture is a primer for the growing paradigm. She writes, “[Afrofuturism] is a total reenvisioning of the past and speculation about the future rife with cultural critique” (9). Womack’s iteration extracts the black speculative mode out of the Euro- centric history and praxis of the futurists who disregarded history’s effect on the present. Speculative and science fiction provides the ground on which black writers can articulate their experiences. Kodwo Eshun’s “Future Considerations for Afrofuturism” concedes to this, “The conventions of science fiction, marginalised within literature yet central to modern thought, can function as allegories for the systemic experience of post-slavery black subjects in the twentieth century. Science fiction, as such, is recast in the light of Afrodiasporic history” (299, emphasis added). Black speculative fiction writers draw on elements of speculative fiction—whether it be aliens, time travel, mythical beasts, or apocalypse—and their knowledge of cultural history to imagine alternative worlds as August Wilson did in writing the dystopia found in Gem of the Ocean. Moreover, speculative fiction does the work of history, Mosley even says it has to the power to rewrite and ignore it (405). Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley, and Gyan Prakash write in “Utopia and Dystopia beyond Space and Time” that “[u]topias and dystopias are histories of the present” (1).